Sleeves from some of the better VELVET UNDERGROUND bootlegs. We could do this all day.
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Wrote this about one of the favorites back on my Agony Shorthand blog in 2004….this CD/record in question is available to listen to here.
SUPERCHARGER WERE FAR OUT……
There’s a live recording from the early 1990s making the rounds on this illegal file-sharing site (I’ve only read about the naughty site, I’d never actually use it to illegally download music!!) from SUPERCHARGER, perhaps the hottest raw, punk-infused “oldies” band of all time. It’s from about 1992 or 1993 at the Covered Wagon in San Francisco, and for all I remember of those years, I was there. I enthusiastically saw the band a good 6-7 times around this period, but it’s funny, I always rated their garage revisionist pals/peers THE MUMMIES higher and thus celebrated with the latter upward of a dozen+ times. History – at least my version of history – now says Supercharger were the better band, and this blazer of a live set confirms it. What came off as a bit inept and tentative at the time – a posture nurtured by the band themselves – is full-on wild and overamped energy here, with the usual coterie of screaming girls in the background cheering them on. (These same females were fixtures at Mummies and Phantom Surfers shows during the era, and a few later started The Trashwomen. The apple did not fall far from the tree).
The set is way tighter than I remembered, and each 90-second knockout is complimented mere seconds later by another crashing intro. Oh, and a hippie in the audience gets disgraced in public – always a treat!
Guitarist/vocalist Darren Raffaelli is sorely missed by “the scene” – this guy was a terrific, sweat-soaked frontman, yelping and whooping his way through 50s ramalama oldies and originals that sounded just like 50s ramalama oldies. This live set even contains a version of BUNKER HILL’s masterpiece “The Girl Can’t Dance”, but the band charge through it so quickly you might’ve been lost in your pint while it was playing (at least that’s where I imagine I was). Raffaelli’s last move that I know about was a mid-90s 45 I never heard called “Donny Denim”, to say nothing of his shepherding of THE DONNAS’ first LP (something I’ll spout about in the weeks to come). Greg Lowery, at least, put his post-Supercharger energies toward a hot label and band, and Karen, the drummer? Saw her at Safeway a few years ago in the dairy section.
Yet Supercharger needn’t be lost to history and illegal, immoral file-sharers – there’s a terrific under-the-radar compilation of their 45s that came out a year ago that I highly recommend called “Singles Party”, and if you haven’t heard “Supercharger Goes Way Out”, by all means get on the case!
(UPDATE: now this is embarrassing. This ill-gotten live set that I was so proud of procuring is actually an OFFICIAL release on Lowery’s Rip Off label! Limited edition! Go to it).
Two BASSHOLES reviews, written by me for WIPE OUT! fanzine, 1998.
I was going through some old files and found that I’d actually written a batch of record reviews for Eric Friedl (aka Eric Oblivian)’s WIPEOUT fanzine in 1998 that I hadn’t seen nor remembered since that time.
I’m not even sure where to find the mag itself, but now that I have the reviews, I figure I’ll post them up here in the weeks to come. I appreciate Eric letting me yak up this stuff in his pages. I had “retired” from the print fanzine business that year, a retirement that lasted 15 years.
This one’s a record I also haven’t heard since 1998. Has anyone?
KING TEARS MORTUARY, Sydney, Australia’s champions of music, live just this past Saturday. Lifted from their Facebook page. Read two pages of chatter with them in the new Dynamite Hemorrhage #2 fanzine.
https://www.tumblr.com/audio_file/dynamitehemorrhage/105029509066/tumblr_nghln0FGzv1rex6a7?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio
You know you’re all growed up when they’re letting you put out live records. Here’s HONEY RADAR’s live entry, a new 4-song 7" that you can listen to here (“Alabama Wax Habit”, one of our favorites) and order up the vinyl of here.
GIBSON BROS, live at Used Kids Records in Columbus, likely around 1986 or so.
These two jumbo music books are sitting on the nightstand, ready to be plowed through over the course of the winter.
There’s “SUB POP USA”, which has very little to do with the successful label of the same name and instead with the fanzine Sub Pop, or Subterranean Pop, which Bruce Pavitt published nine issues of from 1980-1983. I’ve never seen that mag before, but all 9 of ‘em are here. Pavitt then carried on with a column for Seattle’s free rocknroll rag The Rocket from 1983 to 1988, before ramping up the label. Those columns – and more – are all here as well.
The second book is the first printed matter from HoZac Books, and it’s called “NOISE IN MY HEAD: Voices From The Ugly Australian Underground”. It’s by Jimi Kritzler, and it documents the most recent 5-10 years of of Australian rock grunt. Everything from Total Control to UV Race to Fabulous Diamonds (yeah!) to a dozen others I’m not entirely familiar with. Yet.
I’ll emerge from the bed in 2015 to tell you about both books, all right? In the meantime, you can order each at the links.
There’s a download of a live tape of a previously-unavailable BAGS show now available on the revelatory Noise Addiction II blog – live March 30th, 1979 at Club 88 in Los Angeles (remember Wayne, the owner, from his turn in “The Decline of Western Civilization”?), with all sorts of unnamed and therefore unreleased songs. Wow.
The bizarro INFLATABLE BOY CLAMS double 45 from 1981 is coming out via reissue on Superior Viaduct in about a month. Dangerous Minds did a piece on them in anticipatory celebration.
This record was a popular one on the college station I listened to in my youth. Here’s what I wrote about it on Agony Shorthand nine years ago:
INFLATABLE BOY CLAMS : “INFLATABLE BOY CLAMS” 2×45…..
Yesterday mention was made on this site of the ocean of bizarro, shoestring-budget obscurities pouring out of the Anglophilic countries circa 1978-82, many of which are slowly being brought back to consciousness thanks to mp3 blogs, tribute sites and comps like Hyped2Death’s MESSTHETICS and HOMEWORK series. One such record I remember quite well, but never owned until I found this web site & scooped up all five tracks, was the darkly weird INFLATABLE BOY CLAMS 2×45.
KFJC, my teenage radio station of choice, used to play the novelty track “I’m Sorry” from this set all the friggin’ time, and the first time I heard it, it was my favorite song the whole rest of the day. Then I’d hear it three more times a day & the sheen wore off fast – and until last week, I hadn’t heard it in over 20 years (!). “Skeletons” sounds like the rarely-glimpsed side of 45 GRAVE that was keyboard-heavy & proficient in dark, campy cabaret rock. It’s a little goofy, but jarring and endearing nonetheless.
The band were part of the small scene that sprung up around San Francisco’s Club Foot circa 1980-81, a scene that existed on the fringe of the far more extreme FACTRIX/MONTE CAZAZZA/SRL stuff that was big in play at the time & was certainly a ways off from FLIPPER, THE LEWD and their misanthropic ilk. If they’d been from LA, their pals would likely have been the LAFMS crew like MONITOR and BPEOPLE. I’ve never heard PINK SECTION (to my knowledge), but two members of that band were in the Clams as well. Lots more can be learned at the aforementioned Inflatable Boy Clams tribute site. They must have been together only long enough to record this one session, because a band with four females making their own off-beat, deliberately tuneless racket should have been a hot enough property for at least a Subterranean or even a Rough Trade record deal, wouldn’t you think? The more I listen to these tracks, the more they transcend the kitschy novelty aspect, and head toward something a little more timeless and interesting. Let’s reevaluate this thing again a few years from now, what do you say?
AGONY SHORTHAND 