I’ve been on a bit of a bender this year listening to sparse, cracked and echoey female folk/strum in the SIBYLLE BAIER / VASHTI BUNYAN mode, and my favorite discovery this side of MAXINE FUNKE is my most recent one – JULIE BYRNE.
Byrne is actively recording and touring, like, now. She’s the most Baier-like of them all, while retaining her own minimalist approach to ghostly closet folk, veering off into non-guitar experimental pieces at times as well. Start with the semi-recent 45 “Melting Grid” and the LP “Rooms With Walls and Windows” and go from there.
When I resuscitate Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio (soon) I’ll be playing Ms. Byrne and some of her progenitors. Until then – please listen here.
New Expressway to Yr Skull podcast has dropped. Set aside 90 minutes at once. http://www.expresswaytoyrskull.com/2015/08/playlist-082015.html
Hands aching for someone to hold? We can’t do much about that, but we can steer you to something to hold instead – like our fanzines DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE #2 from 2014; DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE #1 from 2013; HEDONIST JIVE BOOK REVIEW #1 from 2015 and even SUPERDOPE #8 from 1998 (!).
DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO 2012-2015
The show may be on (potentially permanent) hiatus, but that doesn’t mean you can’t listen to several dozen past episodes of Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio, totaling roughly 64 hours of sub-underground rocknroll from the last five decades.
(Wait -why is in on hiatus? It’s simple: I’ve truly run out of great songs to play. The 61 shows I’ve made have maybe 10-15 songs that I played more than once, tops, so at 1,200+ songs overall, I feel like I’ve purged the best of the best already. It’s all out there to listen to now. If and when I cobble together enough interesting new material together, perhaps I’ll make another one.)
Grab episodes #18-#61 from iTunes right here.
Stream or download episodes #57-61 on Soundcloud right here.
Looking for episodes #1-17? I have CD-Rs of them and can upload any episode to this post here. Let me know which ones you’re looking for by sending me a message, and I’ll do just that.
(Originally posted on….yeah I know, I keep recycling stuff from 9-10 years ago; that’s because it’s otherwise buried forever on a lost blog that could disappear tomorrow.….my Agony Shorthand blog in 2006)
OPAL : “HAPPY NIGHTMARE BABY” LP……
I am fortunate enough (I think) to be able to say that I saw the DREAM SYNDICATE live a few times in the 80s, but I’m not so lucky as to have caught “the Kendra lineup” – the 1981-82 one that recorded one of my Top 10 fave records ever, “The Days of Wine And Roses”.
Kendra is KENDRA SMITH, and she’s always been sort of a witchy psychedelic mystery lady. She was persona non grata for a year or so after the album (the album), and then all of a sudden she had this new band in 1984 with Dave Roback from the RAIN PARADE called CLAY ALLISON & a great gentle psych EP, and then a couple years later, pop – out came the 1987 album by her new band OPAL, who were actually the same band, and on SST records no less (then regularly polluting the bins with October Faction and Swa records). No tours, no big hoopla, just a fantastic psychedelic/kraut/paisley guitar record that sounds even better to my ears in 2006 than it did back then.
“Happy Nightmare Baby” for years actually took a backseat in my eyes to the posthuomus 1989 OPAL record called “Early Recordings”, which had all the Clay Allison stuff + a few extras. That one was really folky, sometimes-acoustic Velvet Underground-inspired shaman rock, with a lot of the mystical swirling weirdness of their later stuff only hinted at (and it’s great). But today I’m thinking “Nightmare” is the real lost classic. Roback plays guitar & feeds back like the lost son of Syd Barrett and Michael Karoli, but in a really restrained, strum-and-nod off sort of way that sets the flickering-candle mood perfectly.
It’s funny, I saw Roback live with MAZZY STAR around 1990 and his stage presence – dressed in black head to toe, sulking, unsmiling, totally too cool and “above it all” – was so off-putting that I mentally wrote him off as a big poseur for years. But that wasn’t very fair, now was it? And Kendra Smith’s vocals are just the most, you know what I mean? The careful, even way she doles out her words is a beautiful thing, most fully realized on the classic “She’s A Diamond”, a blues that’s maybe the best thing they ever did. I’m also partial to the psych-by-numbers “Magick Power”, which could have come off “Piper At The Gates of Dawn” (it’s that good).
A record with some obvious staying power this great should have been released on CD, don’t you think? I think it may have been at one time, but good luck finding it now.
Currently reading this new book and am enjoying it greatly.
MacDonell writes a self-effacing story of his blurry punk rock coming-of-age in LA punk’s first wave, circa 1977 and beyond. He writes for Slash, he befriends Black Randy, he passes out on his own front lawn.
Read a full interview with the man here, and pick up the book here or here.
*** Update on July 30th: I got really tired of this book in a hurry. Never mind what I said earlier. Here’s what I wrote on GoodReads:
This started out with a bang, and I was all-in….and then quickly descended into a litany of “I was so wasted” drug stories, one after the other, ad nauseum. Really, is there anything more boring that someone’s drug memoir? It gets extremely tiresome about halfway in, by which point I’d lost all my interest and was totally deadened to this guy’s mistakes and motivations, which seemed to revolve around destroying himself as quickly as possible, while making everything into a “party” no matter the day or hour.
The connection to the ‘77-’78 LA punk scene – which is what I though this would be about – is tangential. MacDonnell’s PCP freakouts and blackouts take place at or near The Masque, Whiskey, Canterbury House and so on and so forth, but it’s more an insight into one man’s drugged-out stupidity than it is an illumination into anything new or different that we don’t already know about that scene or era. Music is barely existent in this book and resides in the background of dozens of drug stories. Huge yawn.
We pulled out all of the stops this time to bring you the finest in raw, sub-underground rocknroll from the last five decades. Some epic crate-digging and mp3-filing had to occur before recording of DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #61 could commence, but now that we’re done with it, we’re pretty satisfied with how berserk and gnarly the set of tunes is this time. Download it and see if you agree.
New stuff this time from CHINESE GIRLS, CCTV, SAUNA YOUTH, SEEDS OF DOUBT, SHITFUCKS, CALAMARI GIRLS, HONEY RADAR, PEACERS, RAYS, AQUARIAN BLOOD and so much more……
Stream or download Dynamite Hemorrhage #61 on Soundcloud.
Stream it on MixCloud instead.
Subscribe to the show and grab a bunch of old ones on iTunes.
Track listing:
CHINESE GIRLS – Pop Life
CCTV – Paranoia
SHITFUCKS – Trappen Upp Til Porten
AQUARIAN BLOOD – Savage Mind
SAUNA YOUTH – New Fear
THEE MIGHTY CAESARS – La-La, La-La, La-La-La
KNIGHTS BRIDGE – CJ Smith
CALAMARI GIRLS – He Got That Plan on a Tag on the Back of His Jeans
HONEY RADAR – Bird Bath Math
PEACERS – R.J.D. (Salam)
MADELEINE CHARTRAND – Ani-Kuni
DAVE E. AND THE COOL MARRIAGE COUNSELORS – Searching Through Sears
MERCENARIAS – Da Do
URGE OVERKILL – The Polaroid Doll
CHROME – TV as Eyes
HARD-ONS – Ferdi’s Song
GIRLS AT OUR BEST! – Warm Girls
RAYS – Made of Shadows
THE PLAYTHINGS – Feeling OK
GAS – Pushing Against Me
SEEDS OF DOUBT – Others Pay
Reposting this one in case you missed it. New episode on the way next week.
(Originally posted on my Agony Shorthand blog in 2006)
VARIOUS ARTISTS : “FUZZ CLUB” 7”EP……
The name “Tom Guido” is whispered around these parts (San Francisco) with a mixture of swelling admiration and out-and-out mocking glee. The guy is infamous for being the living embodiment of insane party host “Z-Man” from “Beyond The Valley of the Dolls”, except plied with far more drinks and possessive of far fewer faculties.
His deserved claim to fame is that he turned a series of occasional “club nights” featuring late 80s garage acolyte bands called “The Fuzz Club” into a regular ownership/management gig at The Purple Onion, one of San Francisco’s most famous 1950s-60s comedy & music nightclubs, set smack dab in the middle of North Beach, the entertainment hub of the city at one point (and later the center of the city’s stripping & porn industry). That such a “character” was able to build and nurture such a cool scene around such a great venue was always nothing short of miraculous to me. His inebriated on-stage rants, most often conducted in the middle of a band’s set while they glared at him, featured some of the great ridiculous quotes in rock & roll history, and each night coming home from a Fuzz Club or Onion show was usually spent recounting those gems as much as they were recounting the sets one had seen.
Anyway, I spent a good amount of time at these venues, though I missed a few of the 1989-90 acts documented on this somewhat recent live EP called “Fuzz Club”. DRIVING WHEELS, who I definitely missed, absolutely rip – fast shredding caveman garage, of a par with the pre-lunatic speedburning Dwarves, or the Mummies at their best. If I had made some better entertainment choices in 1989 and not gone to so many friggin’ Thinking Fellers shows or whatever, I might’ve been able to tell you more.
I do remember Guido personally telling me around 1990 or so that I should forget San Francisco, that the “real scene was down in San Mateo” where garage bands like THE MUMMIES, the VANILLA WHORES and WILD BREED were uh, “bred”. All three appear here, but you won’t likely get any whiff of that magickal San Mateo scene of yesteryear, since all 3 are blurry, weak live tape deck versions of bands that were arguably better on record or truly in person (though I could truly care less about the ‘Whores or the Wild Breed).
My favorite of the 7 acts featured here after the Driving Wheels is hands-down THE GAPING WOUNDS, whom I once stumbled upon at the Chatterbox around 1989 or so and never saw nor heard again until this here record. Imagine “Toolin For A Warm Teabag”-era DWARVES with a sneering, pissed-off heroin hottie on vocals instead of Blag Jesus, blowing through a bunch of gnarly ‘core for maybe 10 minutes – oh, and two members actually were in the Dwarves, and around ’89 no one could touch the Dwarves.
So there you have it. I love that my 45 is #423/777 and that it’s personally autographed by Guido himself, but I can’t imagine that anyone outside of European garage collectors and folks who saw one or more of these bands live could ever listen to this thing more than twice. But what do I know?
(postscript – Tom Guido was found, alive and well, in San Francisco just this year (2015) by one of our correspondents)
Dynamite Hemorrhage favorites SALLY SKULL just reunited a few weeks ago after 18+ years for a new show, which you can watch in its entirety here. If you’d like to read the interview I did w/ them, Dynamite Hemorrhage #1 is still (barely) available here.
BLACK FLAG doing “American Waste” with their no-doubt-about-it best singer by a mile, Dez Cadena. Utterly life-changing when I saw this Target Video in high school.
AGONY SHORTHAND 