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I originally wrote this piece for the FUCKIN’ RECORD REVIEWS print fanzine that’s yet to come out (though as I’m sure you know, they’re very much alive otherwise). The editors there gave it a snazzy French title, which I liked. This “data” has a bit of a shelf life – apps and music consumption being a bit of a moving target – so I thought I’d post the piece here.

Au
Courant in the Car

Or, modern man’s musical sublimation to the
machine

by Jay Hinman

It says more about me than
I’d like it to – but I’ll come clean and admit that I’ve fully succumbed to a
nearly 100% digital lifestyle when it comes to the consumption of music (the
occasional 45 or LP purchase notwithstanding – as these are purchased for
ultimate digitization purposes). This really doesn’t even involve compact discs
any longer. Everything I listen to, it’s on my phone. Yeah, my telephone. Who among
us would have imagined such an abomination, even a couple of years ago? I
listen to upwards of an hour or two of music every day, and most often more.
Much of this is done in the car, as I’m one of the unfortunate cogs in the
great, grinding corporate deathburger who commutes a great distance to work.
I’ve outfitted my chariot with an auxiliary hook-up that lets me plop the HTC
One smartphone or my iPod Touch into a cradle, and then run whatever comes out
of it through my car’s speakers. Perhaps you’ve seen, or have yourself
experienced, such a get-up. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it has been
culturally life-changing, and totally has opened me up to entirely new ways of
getting clued in about radical new sounds.

I thought I’d pull together the music apps that I whole- or at least halfheartedly
recommend for you. You’ll probably heard of most of ‘em. Granted, this is
mostly an Android conversation, so I apologize in advance to any lingering iPhone
users out there who haven’t jumped ship like I did a couple years ago – though
I’m pretty sure most of these are available for you holdouts, too. If you’re
still rocking a StarTac or a Razr, I’m sorry, but I do admire your stance on
many levels.

SPOTIFY – Perhaps no application or
service has so upended the way music is consumed and delivered as Spotify has.
Some might say for ill – perhaps musicians themselves, say – and I’m
certainly sympathetic to the argument. That said, wearing my pure consumer hat,
I happily pay them ten bucks a month to listen to the app, ad-free, on mobile –
in fact, I have never actually experienced Spotify as a “free”
customer, since I rarely use a PC to listen to music. The catalogs they pull
from run incredibly deep, and often include brand-new independent and deeply
underground 45s and LPs the week they’re released. Not everyone’s on there, of
course, but seems like 9 out of 10 things I hear about and want to try are
easily found within the app, especially the weirdly experimental music often
written about in publications like The Wire.
The mobile app lets you subscribers store stuff for offline listening, kinda
like you “own” it – which makes it easy to listen to in poor coverage,
or when you’re off the wireless grid entirely. And despite aforementioned
grumblings from a few artists about meager paychecks, I’m chastened to know
that every song I stream deposits at least a couple hundredths of cents in the
musicians’ bank accounts. Totally essential app for the modern music doofus,
and I have to say it’s getting better every update.

FLICKTUNES (now called CARTUNES) – This iTunes alternative
could better be classified as a “public safety” app, as it’s probably
kept me from plowing my vehicle into those in front of and on the sides of me
on far too many occasions. You know how when you’re playing a song or even a
downloaded podcast or radio show in iTunes, you’re only able to
“scroll” though a song – but not advance it 30 seconds forward or
backward? I know – horrifically lame, right? (they call that bar the
“scrubber”, by the way. Thought you’d like to know that). That doesn’t work
when you’re driving, even when your iPhone or iPod is mounted right in front of
you there on the air vents. FlickTunes lets me use a “two-finger
swipe” to easily advance 30 seconds in any song, which works especially
well when I’m listening to a radio show and I don’t wanna hear a particular
song or songs. There are other cool features as well, but that one in
particular is a lifeline both for me and the people who drive near me.

8TRACKS – I’ve been singing the
praises of this app for years in my various online blather forums, and my
enthusiasm hasn’t diminished in the slightest. 8Tracks is user-programmed and
-curated mix tapes, effectively. It has attracted some incredibly knowledgeable
experts across all sorts of sub-genres: 60s french pop; KBD-style punk;
pre-WWII Latin music; C86 pop; female-created electronic music of the 60s; and
loads of indie bands of every stripe. Wind it up and let it go. It’s the next
evolution of radio, if you think about it, and about the only downside is the
inability to skip more than 5 songs in a row – which has nothing to do with
8Tracks, and everything to do with
keeping things kosher with the labels and publishing houses. Some curators I
recommend over there are Isitanart, SpaceBunnySounds, the13thTrack, fuckinrecordreviews
himself, ohanaorsomething, urbankill,
Wub-Fur Internet Radio and hey, me.
I’m at DynamiteHemorrhage, and I
have a page full of mixes for the streaming-minded. The whole thing works
just as well, if not better, on your laptop, and there’s a cheapo premium
version if you don’t want to see ads, which I don’t.

SOUNDCLOUD – At first it seemed like
this site was all about people uploading field recordings of bird sounds &
such, but music fiends being music fiends, it morphed into a hosting site for
mp3 files, and now it’s become one of premier locales for underground music
from the independent and/or totally unaffiliated. The difference between mp3
blogs of 2015 and those of, say, 2008, is that the latter truly gave away mp3s
as downloads – hey, I did it myself. Today, almost everyone posts them on
Soundcloud, which makes artists happy, and makes it more difficult for you to
“acquire” a track without paying for it. (Yes, I certainly know about
the workarounds, god love ‘em). It also means that, if you still follow what
few music blogs exist, you need to click the little heart icon on the song
that’s been put onto Soundcloud, which then saves that song for you to listen
to later. I’m always creating these playlists of songs I read about, then
listening later on SoundCloud. The app still needs to evolve a bit, but it’s
very useful & seems to be the place where mp3 uploads of all kinds have
settled the past couple of years.

BANDCAMP – This one comes with
some major caveats. Bandcamp became the platform of choice for independent
artists to store their recorded music over the past 24-36 months, displacing
MySpace entirely. It’s 1,000 times better than MySpace ever was, which
obviously isn’t saying a goddamn thing. There used to be something cool called
Bandcamper, an app that applied a “presentation layer” over the
broader Bandcamp universe, but it had some gaping holes (like maddening search
functionality) – and it seems to have been hounded out of the app stores
entirely. Along came Bandcamp’s own app a little over year ago, and it’s
beautiful. If you’ve bought something on Bandcamp – and who hasn’t – it’s
available in full for streaming from the app with a touch of a button. It’s
cloud-based storage for everything you’ve ever purchased there, like, ever. That said, if you downloaded
something for free from Bandcamp, or even if you willingly gave a few sawbucks
to a “name your price” album or 45, it won’t show up here. Why not? Hell if I know. There are also discovery features where
you can find out what other people are buying, and then stream 1 meager song from each of their albums
(that’s all that’s allowed) – but I do miss Bandcamper’s smorgasbord of music compiled
from the entire Bandcamp universe. (Note:
it looks like they may have sorta addressed this in a recent update, so stream
away…!)

MIXCLOUD – A total up & comer that started really delivering just the past
few months. Initially it was much like 8Tracks: a place to upload your curated
modern mix tape, just not nearly as good. Recently it’s found a new niche as
the place where “disk jockeys” from the world’s terrestrial and internet radio
stations and from laptop-based phony
radio shows upload their recently-finished programs. This is a profoundly
important development if you’re not already a leading expert on every known
corner of the underground music universe, and lean heavily on clued-in curators
the way I do. Given the newfound ubiquitous matching of cool radio sets and
Mixcloud, I’m able to subscribe to sublimely righteous radio shows emanating
from Belgium to Bellingham, and these shows simply pop up in my feed every
week. It beats setting an alert to listen to the thing in real-time (old school!) by well more than a mile.

iCRATES – This really isn’t a
car app and is therefore a bit of an outlier to the broader article, but it’s a
terrific iPod/iPhone app. iCrates is for those of us/you who still buy records
and CDs, and who would like an aggregated peek into where you can find a
particular piece on vinyl or a given disc. It looks into the Discogs, eBay
and Amazon databases and presents you with who’s selling what, where. Far be it
for me to do anything to hurt traditional record stores, which I love, but this
is their worst nightmare unless they’re hot on the draw and are presciently selling
their wares in these forums. Used vinyl prices in stores can be easily undercut
with a quick search on iCrates for that same vinyl at a far better price. Capitalist
porker? Guilty as charged. Besides that, it’s totally fun to mess around with,
as it has the amazing Discogs.com database, with photos and sleeve scans, right
there at your proverbial fingertips.

WFMU, WMUA, KFJC, RADIO
VALENCIA, HOLLOW EARTH RADIO etc. – Finally, there are the many
college/pirate radio station apps. I recognize that there are aggregators like
Tune-In out there that work really well, but I personally prefer an easy-to-see
icon on my device that I can punch whilst driving, rather than the extra three
clicks it takes to find what I want there. That could be the different between
a mellow drive home and Hamburger Highway.

The best radio station
apps start playing immediately upon launch, and provide song identification in
big letters on the screen. WFMU’s app goes those one better, and not only
streams all of their podcasts and show archives, but even lets you
“favorite” individual songs so you can check up on them later (or buy
them on iTunes if they’re available there right now). Absolutely the best radio
station app, from a station that’s always one step ahead of everyone else. I
personally also enjoy the quasi-legit pirate stations Hollow Earth Radio,
BFF.FM and Radio Valencia, along with college stations KFJC, WMUA,
KUSF IN EXILE, KEXP and KDVS. This is where time and patience
finally meet the limits of my commute – we’ve arrived at home, and seriously,
there are no other radio stations I’ve even got the time to investigate on this drive – so we’ll stick with these old
favorites.

Now some folks have
informed me that people even “listen” to music on “YouTube”. YouTube! As if. What’s wrong with you
kids? Keep your eyes on the goddamn road, and stop watching music videos – I’m futzing
with my smartphone over here.
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(Originally written back in 2004)

VELVET UNDERGROUND : “BOOTLEG SERIES, VOL. 1: THE QUINE TAPES” 3xCD…..

This is one of those listening “projects” of mine that lie in a netherworld somewhere between pure entertainment enjoyment and painstaking scholarly research. It’s one that I’ve been eager to “tackle” for some time. I finally got around to active listening of all three of the heralded VELVET UNDERGROUND “Quine Tapes” discs in their entirety this past week, and like just about everyone else who’s heard them, I am very, very impressed. The Velvet Underground come away from the experience sitting in the fabled catbird seat for all-time great rock bands, right where they were perched a week ago.

The word on the street was that these were the very best of the Velvet Underground live tapes out there, far too good to only circulate on bootlegs, and deserving of a proper release. In October 2001, Polydor Records did just that. I have to agree that they’re among the best I’ve ever heard, up there with “Sweet Sister Ray” and “The Legendary Guitar Amp Tape” and some of the great rehearsal material that surfaced on the “Peel Slowly And See” box set. What makes these CDs special is that this is truly the Velvet Underground at their unadorned, most rocking best, not subject to anyone’s agenda for track listing or to shoddy recording techniques (though Robert Quine’s tapes are a bit RAW). It’s really just one young law student and a tape recorder, taping up his #1 favorite band like the seer, visionary and public servant he was.

In researching this collection on the World Wide Web, I read a couple of instructive reviews that capture some good insights on the set. This is from Jonathan Moscowitz in the New York Press:

“Quine’s tapes were made right before the Velvets went into the studio to record Loaded, an experience so negative it made Reed quit the band and move back home to Long Island. You can hear that sound foreshadowed in the versions of “It’s Just Too Much,” “Ride into the Sun” and “Follow the Leader” offered here. Good-natured and bouncy, they show off Reed’s love of old-school rock ’n’ roll and Sterling Morrison’s effortless rhythm work. At the other end of the spectrum sit the old Factory-era chestnuts “Venus in Furs” and “The Black Angel’s Death Song.” In their original incarnations both these songs were built around Cale’s heavily droning viola, and it’s instructive to hear how well the band evokes the junky creepiness of their first album without him.”

These shows were recorded in late 1969 at a large hall (The Family Dog) and a small club (The Matrix) in San Francisco, as well as the basketball gym at Washington University in St. Louis, thus illuminating the band in both spacious and intimate environs. There appear to be some extremely small, uninterested crowds in attendance, and the sets, as Moscovitz says, lean heavily to “Loaded” and third album material. There’s also a few big eye-openers: “Follow The Leader”, long considered a “lost” and highly sought-after VU song, is probably not worth much further hype as it’s a middling chugger that goes on about 10 minutes too long, clocking in at a robust 17:05. Yet nothing compares to the not one, not two, but THREE wholly unique versions of “Sister Ray”, one sitting on each disc.

You really think the Velvet Underground were the antithesis of the hippie scene? This set gives one pause. Rather than coming in blazing with posturing and standoffish black-leather New York hipster ‘tude, the Velvets instead adapted to their San Francisco environs quite well, and cranked out lengthy instrumental passages that sound like any typical free- form band of the period (just better). Quine says of the November 7-9th 1969 shows, “The first weekend, at the Family Dog, it was basically just a bunch of hippies there. They brought their tambourines, harmonicas, and were playing along. I made tapes of that stuff that came out very well. It was a large place, so they could really turn up the amps. The versions of “Sister Ray” are especially terrific if you’re willing to smoke a fat doob and sit back and feeeeeel them. Built around one of the all-time great riffs, the song has so many different piece parts that it’s really 12 songs in one – now multiply that by 3 different versions (one slow, one hard, one that morphs into an excellent “Foggy Notion”) and, well, 12 cubed = 1,728 different combinations and ways of playing “Sister Ray” on any given night. Quine captured three of them, and they’re fantastic.

There’s also a brilliant distorted version of “What Goes On” and two incredible “I’m Waiting For The Man”s – one gentle and jaunty, one dark and mean. The banana really does peel down to the base once you’ve tackled all 3 discs here, and I’m left with a much better picture of the Velvet Underground live experience than previously captured on various bootlegs. I’m confident that no two shows were identical, and that this was a band well worth slavishly following the way Quine obviously did. In sum, this small box set is essential for those who feel it important to dig deep into Velvet Underground arcana beyond the 4 LPs, the 2 posthumous LPs and the “Peel Slowly” box set. We are a limited crew, granted, but we make up in fanaticism what we lack in self-restraint – an endearing quality for Agony Shorthand readers and those few people who love them. 

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https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/221243181/stream?client_id=3cQaPshpEeLqMsNFAUw1Q?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio

After a bit of a lengthy summer absence, it’s DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #62, saddled up and toolin’ for gnarl. I’ve got sixty-some-odd minutes of sub-underground rocknroll from the last five decades for you, as requested. New stuff this time from POLIO CLUB (pictured), JIM NOTHING, DRINKS, CCTV, PEACERS, HONEY RADAR, CALAMARI GIRLS and more. We go to the library and pull out some TEENAGE FILMSTARS, MONSTER TRUCK FIVE, JULIE BYRNE and even G.G. ALLIN. I promise to never leave you wanting for six weeks again, OK?

Stream or download the show on Soundcloud.

Stream it on MixCloud instead.

Subscribe to the show and download old episodes on iTunes.

Track listing:

JIM NOTHING – Loser Feeling
POLIO CLUB – Light as a Feather
THE LOVE TRIANGLE – I’m Still Waiting for a Buzz
TEENAGE FILMSTARS – I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape
HENRY’S DRESS – Zero Zero Zero
THE SHALLOWS – Trial By Separation
JULIE BYRNE – Young Wife
HONEY RADAR – Look Closer
HALF JAPANESE – Karen
TOMMY JAY – No Place
PEACERS – Kick on the Plane
CHINESE GIRLS – Belt
CONEHEADS – 1982 (live)
DWARVES – Fuckhead
GG ALLIN – Drink, Fight and Fuck
MEAT PUPPETS – Unpleasant (1980 demo)
MONSTER TRUCK FIVE – Piece of Work
CCTV – Quiet
THE PETTICOATS – Allergy
THE DELINQUENTS – Motivation Complex
CALAMARI GIRLS – All The Celebrities
DRINKS – Laying Down Rock

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Interview: Bent

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urbankill:

image

Earlier this year I had a chance to interview Brisbane’s Bent on behalf of FRR for FRR Zine #1 (see more about FRR and its zine @ FRR’s tumblr). Bent’s full-length cassette debut in the form of “Non Soon” came out on Virtual Cool in late 2014, and it was a year end favorite of both myself and those behind the curtain at Fuckin’ Record Reviews (aka FRR). The band consists of Heidi Cutlack, Sky McNicol and Glen Schenau, all veterans of the Brisbane music scene, and every other thing you’ll want to know about them can be read below. I half-heatedly and indirectly tried to engage them on a neutral (from my POV) discussion about arts funding in Australia, but they didn’t take the bait and it would have been weird/disrespectful to go down that path further, considering how little it had to do with why I wanted to reach out to them in the first place. They were definitely a pleasure to interview. Here goes:

The three of you are involved in numerous projects. What are some bands you play in, outside of Bent?

Skye: I think bands are like other relationships in your life…many different kinds can co-exist and maybe make the stew richer, so long as you’re totally committed and present for everyone you play with…and don’t get the songs mixed up!
My first love is improvising and the group I’ve been playing with longest is a pot of cosmic gronk called Warden Burger. I also play in a few other Brisbane bands including drums in Scrabble(d) and violin in GKATGKs. For both Scrabble and GKs I was first and foremost a friend and a fan and was pretty over the moon at eventually being asked to join! For me, those bands kind of sound like the noise Brisbane makes when it creaks…

Glen: Per Purpose is my own vehicle, and he’s still choking my smoke – Gerland Krenny and the Gerbalb Keaneys, Cured Pink and sometimes Sky Needle all waiting in the wings. I’d like to think this list is enough to keep me busy – and sometimes it is. I am 25 years old.

Heidi: The only other band that currently has a piece of my heart and or lazy talents is Gerald Keaney and the Gerald Keaneys. Readers will now make the un-obvious observation that the entire Bent band is in the ‘GKs’. But it wasn’t always the case back in 2012 when I was plonked into that crew of weirdos or such a reputation that band always seems to have. It had an almost completely different line up then, but it’s ever changing members is a never changing trait. I’m talking a bit about this band because if you listen to/ read the liner scrawling notes of Non Soon you’ll hear clunks and clangs of The Gerald Keaneys between Bent ‘songs’. So there you go.
  Other than that there’s been a couple other bands I’ve played in but there’s no time to say what who what’s.

Heidi: Oh yeah, Glen also had Marl Karx, his first ever band, he made with Michaela Chin, and was in the ever impressing band Psy Ants oooaahhhoo

Glen: oooaahhhoo

Was there any scene or style that you feel like you’ve evolved out of? Or any experiences earlier on that provided a template that you’re still expanding from? I’ve heard most of the bands you’ve mentioned and it seems like there was a willingness to experiment from the onset.


Heidi: Well I’d never played in a band before Bent began back in 2011, the lineup then was different though – myself and two other girls named Katie and Julia. But the first ‘songs’ I guess you could call ’em, that I ever started writing were greatly inspired by current Aus underground bands at the time – Psy Ants, On/Oxx, Per Purpose, Gutters? I can’t really think of much else though. There were also odd pieces like Arab On Radar, DNA stuff like that – real cooky wonky stuff that’s hard to find – I knew I could make my own thing out of it.
But it was going to shows in Brisbane and seeing other kids that were just like me, and see them play in bands together or perform exotic experimental nonsense sound in front of their friends – THAT was what put the ideas in my head. Because what they spat out of their crumbling drum kits, and shabby creaking guitars and half-good vocals was and still is some of the most difficult music to find in the world, because no one else could make it but them. I hadn’t heard anything more authentic, not from the Pixies or Sonic Youth or bloody Nick Cave (as far as ‘band bands’ go).
I remember seeing Per Purpose play in a hall that was renamed Burst City for a time when kids were playing shows there, around 2010, I was 18. But for Per Purpose –  I still can’t put a label on what they sounded like, and that’s what made me think – I could and should do this! Ha ha
Oh Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is cool, yep she’s great – she still gives me inspiration.

Glen: Being in the unique position of g uitarist in a bass led three piece band, I guess I’m expanding from the Psy Ants template I was a part of a few years ago. Bent don’t need a feedback wizard, so I stick to little post-it guitar notes all over Heidi’s songs. ‘Ten fly partners in a rotten chicken cup’, ‘did I do that?’, ‘click clack’, stuff like that.

Skye: Once my school music teacher wanted to quit his band, and offered me in his place. I rocked up to my first practise with these awesome old (they probably weren’t, but I was 13) folkies and asked if they had some sheet music or charts for the songs…they laughed at me and told me to first listen, and then try to play and listen at the same time. That was my first experience of improvising and it made a huge impression on me. Also, they bought me my first beer;-)

Years later I found an ad in rave magazine for a violinist…the band I joined was called Marlinchen and was largely improvised and instrumental. We all agreed that we were trying to play something like the soundtrack to dark fable or a cinematic dream never filmed…any experimenting was welcome within that aesthetic. Not long after joining I found out that we were performing at Audio Pollen Social Club, then at a mysterious place called the forest (I had only just moved to Brisbane and thought it might be an actual forest!)  Audio Pollen completely blew my mind…boundaries were blurred or non existent in so many ways I’d never experienced before, particularly between performer and spectator. People would come week after week, challenging themselves to get up and perform in some new capacity, or to explore and hone what they were working on creatively at the time. I think I’ve been trying to expand on these two experiences ever since…trying to listen and play at the same time, while staying curious.

As an outsider observing a scene like Brisbane, I’m always blown away by the freedom you seem to have collectively, as far as experimentation goes. In America things are more rigid, even on an underground level. We have our own support systems in independent music, but what tends to come with that is more adherence to a style, set of aesthetics, etc. Is there anything culturally about your city, or Australia more broadly, that lends itself to artists being so open-minded? Or do I have a false sense of what’s going on? It’s extremely easy for me to be hyper-focused on one aspect of your culture and filter everything else out, I suppose.

Skye: I have great affection for  Brisbane…lost city of the dags. I think that plays a big part in the culture of mangy experimentation and rampant diy…we’re outwardly not known as a cultural hub, which I think is freeing! There is no particular cool, underground or otherwise to conform to. The scene is small and incestuous, the weather is hot and the light intense…maybe the humidity causes our brains to fester in an interesting way…

Heidi: There are sort of underground bands in Bris that put a lot of pressure on themselves to sound a certain way in their scene, some might call em hipsters? Bands in that crowd often all end up looking and sounding very similar to one another, even though they think they feel different. Ah I don’t want to sound mean, but we’ll just never fit in with them because we humbly make & do what we like without questioning ourselves too much, or at all. So it depends on the individual on where they end up in the norm-to-weirdo scale. Not considering you’re part of any kinda scene is probably a good start to feeling no pressure from other musicians, I mean you’ll end up in one no matter what. There are bands in the middle of the scale which are fantastic – Barbiturates is one that stands out in my mind.
But also, it might be something that’s unique to the humble Bris, because when I’m in Melbourne or even Sydney, the wild-eyed sounds-I-never-heard-before are infrequently experienced.

Changing gears to your recent album, I was wondering if the juxtaposition between the interludes and the actual songs on “Non Soon” has some significance?

Heidi: mm! I don’t think I’d ever let Bent put out an album with just songs alone. There’s a lot more to Bent than our constructed songs. To tell you the truth I rarely listen to bands except when I see them live or they’re playing on the radio in my kitchen. For me, when I’m in my room I usually have playing some freaky abstract Japanese music like Geinoh Yamashirogumi, that’s what has inspired me most. So I wanted to allow people to have a broader concept of Bent, rather than just another conventional band – When the three of us come together we’re an unusual lucid dream team.

I’ve read a lot of positive reviews of your live shows from various people. There’s a tug and pull in your music, where it shifts between loose and taut. How natural does the material on “Non Soon” come out in a live setting? Did it take time to get comfortable working together with these songs in particular, or do you find it translates well in a live setting? Do you improvise much?

Glen: Skye and I have a looser role in holding the songs together than Heidi, so there is naturally a degree of improv in what we do. if only slightly. I can’t play the same thing, I won’t play the same thing, and if you don’t buy me that toy, I’m gonna go MENTAL mummy

Skye: The tug and pull is so central to our dynamic (musically and as whole humans) that I’d be unsettled if we started playing crisp, tight, cemented versions of our songs. I know I sometimes fail to play the same thing twice. We’re all quite intense people and I think we’re at our best live when we meld all that energy into a taut band, and then twang it and let the bendy spasmatic droplets fly.

Heidi: mm mm! what they said, I do write the structures of the songs so there’s only so much improvisation I can do without confusing those two. But when we do improvise on stage, usually before the set begins it always sounds liking likeable to me. The songs from Non Soon are played just the same as the recording – except for the tin cans and rattling spoons and stuff, we don’t have enough hands for that.

What do you guys have in your future right now, with Bent and beyond? Could you picture yourselves touring the states?

Skye: We’re going to Japan! Everyone will say that, but we are! I’d love to tour the states. I’ll go anywhere and play with anyone!

Glen: I picture bank error in my favour, I picture bank error in Skye’s favour and I picture bank error in Heidi’s favour.

Heidi: Oh yeah sure thing I’ll perform to any crowd yes-sir – a few more part-time jobs to save up before I ever get over there. But yep Japan o Japan 楽しみにしています！

You can keep up to up to date with Bent’s music projects at their Bandcamp: https://bentbent.bandcamp.com

You can still purchase “Non Soon” digitally, although the cassette is long sold-out: https://virtualcool.bandcamp.com/album/non-soon

Glen recently worked on Cured Pink’s “As A Four Piece Band” LP, which is out now on RIP Society Records.

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Derek Bostrom, who drummed and (as I’ve learned) originally sang for The Meat Puppets, uploaded a host of early 1980s demos of the band, some made even before they started getting proper gigs.

Not only will you hear feral early versions of “H-Elenore”, “Unpleasant”, “Blue Green God” and “In A Car”, they do a host of wild and surprising (and contemporary) covers that range from Vom’s “Punkmobile” to The Flesh Eaters’ “Sleeping Sickness” to Wire’s “Outdoor Miner”.

Check it all out here.

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(I wrote this review ten years ago for another blog. Still one of the best music books of all time).

“LEXICON DEVIL: THE FAST TIMES AND SHORT LIFE OF DARBY CRASH AND THE GERMS” by Brenden Mullen and Don Bolles…..

About three months ago I finally devoured this book in a single 6-hour plane trip to New York, and at the conclusion of my journey I declared it to be one of the Top 5 rock and roll books I had ever read. I was so excited about this oral history that I was going to write a 10-paragraph oratory of my own about it for Agony Shorthand, imploring you to read it and enumerating all the reasons why you should do so immediately. Well, I plum forgot what I was going to write, and don’t have the book on me right now to jog my memory, so here we are.

I think the reason I didn’t jump on this when it came out a few years ago is because it was released mere months after BRENDEN MULLEN’s LA punk scene oral history “We Got The Neutron Bomb”, a large chunk of which concerned The Germs and their effect on Los Angeles and the greater American punk movement. Reckoning that “Lexicon Devil” would be a mere expansion of the stories told in “Neutron Bomb”, I resolved to read it in a couple years’ time. Maybe that made “Lexicon Devil” that much better, I don’t know, but where “Neutron Bomb” was merely an adequate retelling of the greatest punk rock scene in the history of the form (Los Angeles 1977-83, baby!), this book is sooo much more.

“Lexicon Devil” takes the story of Darby and Pat (Jan Paul and George) and positions it against the broader freakiness of the 1970s, and does so masterfully. The very best chapter in a book packed with incredible stories is the tale of their alternative, Scientology/EST-like high school-within-a-school at University High during the mid-70s, an experience so warped and beyond comprehension you have to figure those teachers would be behind bars if their tried their hippie mind-control BS on the school kids of today. But it sure made a man out of Jan Paul Beahm, hunh? He took these formative learnings, combined them with massive amounts of drugs & alcohol, and a deeply-repressed homosexuality that, in 1977, was definitely very uncool, and created the “Bobby Pyn” and “Darby Crash” characters of legend.

What I loved about the book, though, was just how well the interviews were threaded together to tell a much larger story than that of The Germs. Existing as it did on the edges of Hollywood flash and cash, there are many stories of the punks’ rubbing up against movie idols or mainstream rock folks and the sometimes inevitable troubles than ensued. The whole book is filled with the most seedy and depressing characters imaginable. Of the ones still alive, like the reprehensible “Gerber”, you get to read their puffed-up yarns from the old days, and almost feel drunk with enthusiasm for their heedless youth & reckless stupidity as a result. I mean, these kids were answerable to no one but themselves – very few had jobs, all were either alcoholics or drug addicts (with a few notable exceptions), and they rocked 24/7 to some of the great bands of all time – WEIRDOS, BAGS, GERMS, DILS, X, MIDDLE CLASS, FLESH EATERS etc. – and all had wild sex with each other and each other’s friends. Doesn’t that sound like a blast? Of course it does, except when you’re creeped out & repulsed by the goings-on described herein.

Characters who were very much in the center of things, like BLACK RANDY and DAVID BROWN, get their stories told better than any other account to date, and this in a book ostensibly about The Germs. Amazingly, Don Bolles comes across as the voice of reason and normalcy in this book, and as anyone who’s met the guy will tell you, those are not words that leap to tongue in his presence. But he’s a survivor, and as cliché as that might sound, once you read the accounts of the crazed lives the first-wave LA punks lived, you develop a newfound respect for the resilience of those who came out with their brains intact, and continue to play music or contribute in other ways to this day (hello, Alice Bag and Chris D.).

Darby, of course, did not, and this book does an excellent job letting others put him on the posthumous therapist’s couch to try and dissect what went wrong. I can’t recommend “Lexicon Devil” highly enough – it’s a riveting read, and can even be appreciated by audiences far removed from the rabid LA punk admiration society.