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(Originally posted on my Agony Shorthand blog back in 2005)

THEE MIGHTY CAESARS : “DON’T GIVE ANY DINNER TO HENRY CHINASKI” LP

Hands down the best record of BILLY CHILDISH’s exceptionally prolific career. I went hog wild scarfing up MIGHTY CAESARS vinyl in the late 80s/early 90s when the first Crypt best-of compilation turned me onto these guys, and at one point I think I had the entire discography before Thee Headcoats went off the deep end and tossed off onto the public every fart & titter committed to tape . This one from 1987, all 19 minutes of it, was by far the boldest and most raw thing this very bold & raw trio put to vinyl, featuring early wide-groove, near-45rpm versions of hits like “She’s Just 15”, “Devious Means” and “I Can Tell”.

This is when Childish & co. were deepest into their LINK WRAY fixation(s), so among the 10 tracks are incredible, hotwired versions of “Comanche” and “Run Chicken Run” – the former is so booming & loud I’d venture to say I’d even take it over Link’s version. Also features a thumper of a run-through of THE TROGGS’ “I Want You” and several other fantastic originals that never made it to later best-of comps (to my knowledge), like “The Bay of Pigs” and my fave, “La-La, La-La, La-La-La” (easily one of the Top 3-4 Caesars tracks ever).

It’s a band that’s not difficult to forget about sometimes, given their daunting discography and near vanishment from the historical record, but man, if someone was wise & prescient enough to re-press this thing, I can think of a lot of ears that’d wanna hear it.

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dynamitehemorrhage:

Weeks in the making, it’s Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #60, a kinda longish-running music podcast/phony radio show featuring sub-underground rocknroll from the previous five decades – and then some.

Because I dawdled and took my time w/ this one, it meant I was able to cobble together some stellar new materials from VITAL IDLES, SHITFUCKS, SAUNA YOUTH, ERASE ERRATA, RAYS, BUMMER’S EVE, SPRAY PAINT, FRAU, HONEY RADAR and even LIME CRUSH. Oh yeah.

I also wandered down into the Dynamite Hemorrhage Library and pulled up pre-2015 material from DANNY & THE DRESSMAKERS, BONA DISH, DIE KREUZEN, TEDDY & THE FRAT GIRLS and more top musical favorites of yours, on quality par with those.

Download or stream Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #60 on Soundcloud.

Give it a listen over on Mixcloud instead.

Download this one and subscribe to the show on iTunes.

Track listing:

VITAL IDLES – My Sentiments
SPRAY PAINT – Entry Level Human
TEDDY & THE FRAT GIRLS – I Owe It To The Girls
LIME CRUSH – It’s You
TIME FLYS – In My Skool
HUMAN SWITCHBOARD – No!
SNEAKS – This Is
FRAU – Discipline
THE FLESH EATERS – Agony Shorthand (1978 demo)
HONEY RADAR – Drink Your Magazine
THE FALL-OUTS – Another Fad
DAVIE ALLEN & THE ARROWS – The Young World
THE BRISTOLS – Questions I Can’t Answer
RAYS – Drop Dead
DANNY & THE DRESSMAKERS – Don’t Make Another Bass Guitar, Mr. Rickenbacher
DIE KREUZEN – Rumors
SHITFUCKS – Alla Pa Busen
DADAMAH – Prove
SAUNA YOUTH – Abstract Notions
MYELIN SHEATHS – Half Wit
ERASE ERRATA – Another Reason To Arrest and Imprison The “Free”
THE PITS – Dumb Things
BONA DISH – Challenge
BUMMER’S EVE – Blue

We’ll be heading out on a bit of a vacation for a few days, so thought we’d leave you with a re-post of last week’s podcast, just in case you hadn’t pressed play yet.

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I bought my first copy of Maximum RocknRoll since….well….let’s say it’s been a few years. Why? Because they had the good sense to have Dynamite Hemorrhage contributing editor Erika Elizabeth write a column.

She’s in the new July issue, talking about THE SHIFTERS, URANIUM CLUB, her lost female-fronted punk piece in Dynamite Hemorrhage #2, and some other deeply-buried obscurities that you need an alterna-sherpa like Ms. Elizabeth to help find. 

You can order it here. Listen to her monthly podcast here.
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(Originally written on my Agony Shorthand blog back in 2005 as a review/celebration of 45 Grave’s posthumous “Autopsy” LP)

There
was a brief period in my life, quite early in my punk fandom, when I
declared to the world that the greatest 45 in the history of punk rock
was this band’s “Black Cross / Wax”. I once stumbled onto college
radio three sheets to the wind and pronounced it so, and proceeded to
emit a ghoulish, gurgling on-mic scream along with Dinah Cancer during
“Black Cross”’s crucial break. Only after years of ridicule and
subsequent therapy can I make my fragile peace with that godforsaken
evening.

I bring this up because I’ve seen very few fans hold
this band up for much of anything in the intervening years, except as
one of many cool early 80s bands trolling for gigs in Los Angeles during
a period in which there were plenty. Goths haven’t really fully
embraced them, least not last time I checked, given 45 GRAVE’s
– or at least this album’s – fast, screeching, near-hardcore tempos.
These tempos and the sheer power & speed of the delivery on this
fine record mitigate a whole host of problems, not the least of which is
the lyrics and all the bat/cave/crucifix/coffin tomfoolery they were
peddling.

When “Autopsy”
came out posthumously in 1987, a lot of us were truly floored, because
outside of “Black Cross” we’d never heard 45 Grave play so fast. They’d made ther mark up to that time with an awful dirgy metal tune called “Party Time” that was on the “Return of the Living Dead” soundtrack, a film soundtrack notable to me in high school because, like “Repo Man”, it had PUNK on it!!!

But “Party Time” blew, as did the majority of the band’s only official LP, “Sleep In Safety”. What I didn’t know until In The Red put out that fantastic CONSUMERS
LP was that the early 45 Grave were a direct outgrowth of that blazing
Phoenix punk band’s 1977 recordings, and that the “Autopsy” recordings
were 45 Grave at their very earliest, ripping it up in fine
full-fidelity style like THE MISFITS and THE BAGS. Since
they featured not only Paul Cutler from The Consumers but Don Bolles
from The Germs & Rob Ritter from The Bags, the tear-it-up pedigree
was highly refined & practiced in the legend-making punk rock dark
arts. And Cutler was bold enough to swipe most of his best songs from
The Consumers, and then re-record them with a female singer & his
hot new band = 45 Grave.

Granted, the horror BS was/is a
little much, but like The Misfits, it was a gimmick that could mostly be
shunted aside if you pretended you’d recently had a partial lobotomy.
Only “Dinah Cancer”’s banshee vocals and some select atrocious lyrics
still make my skin crawl, now that I’ve mentally removed my frontal
lobes. This collection nets you that wild-ass “Black Cross” 45,
certainly one of the top 197 punk 45s of all time, a large batch of
90-second howlers, the novelty “Monster Mash”-like “Riboflavin Flavored,
Non-Carbonated, Polyunsaturated Blood” and even an early “Partytime”
that almost doesn’t suck.

I wasn’t even sure this even made
it out to CD until I read that it’s one of the rarest CDs going, selling
on eBay for $268. Now how do you figure that? I busted the LP out last
week and gave it a full-bosom nostalgia listen, and I can say that the
center still held. Check your local auction listings and keep that
wallet stuffed!

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Weeks in the making, it’s Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #60, a kinda longish-running music podcast/phony radio show featuring sub-underground rocknroll from the previous five decades – and then some.

Because I dawdled and took my time w/ this one, it meant I was able to cobble together some stellar new materials from VITAL IDLES, SHITFUCKS, SAUNA YOUTH, ERASE ERRATA, RAYS, BUMMER’S EVE, SPRAY PAINT, FRAU, HONEY RADAR and even LIME CRUSH. Oh yeah.

I also wandered down into the Dynamite Hemorrhage Library and pulled up pre-2015 material from DANNY & THE DRESSMAKERS, BONA DISH, DIE KREUZEN, TEDDY & THE FRAT GIRLS and more top musical favorites of yours, on quality par with those.

Download or stream Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #60 on Soundcloud.

Give it a listen over on Mixcloud instead.

Download this one and subscribe to the show on iTunes.

Track listing:

VITAL IDLES – My Sentiments
SPRAY PAINT – Entry Level Human
TEDDY & THE FRAT GIRLS – I Owe It To The Girls
LIME CRUSH – It’s You
TIME FLYS – In My Skool
HUMAN SWITCHBOARD – No!
SNEAKS – This Is
FRAU – Discipline
THE FLESH EATERS – Agony Shorthand (1978 demo)
HONEY RADAR – Drink Your Magazine
THE FALL-OUTS – Another Fad
DAVIE ALLEN & THE ARROWS – The Young World
THE BRISTOLS – Questions I Can’t Answer
RAYS – Drop Dead
DANNY & THE DRESSMAKERS – Don’t Make Another Bass Guitar, Mr. Rickenbacher
DIE KREUZEN – Rumors
SHITFUCKS – Alla Pa Busen
DADAMAH – Prove
SAUNA YOUTH – Abstract Notions
MYELIN SHEATHS – Half Wit
ERASE ERRATA – Another Reason To Arrest and Imprison The “Free”
THE PITS – Dumb Things
BONA DISH – Challenge
BUMMER’S EVE – Blue
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(Originally written in 2006 on my Agony Shorthand blog)

A couple of years ago I made a list, as I so often do, of the hallmarks of early 80s American hardcore punk rock. #1 with a bullet was the debut LP from Milwaukee’s DIE KREUZEN. I said something along the lines of:

Simply put, this is just the fiercest, most punishing record I’ve ever heard. If that sort of bluntness piques your interest, then the debut LP from Milwaukee’s finest is made for you. It makes God weep, Motorhead tremble and Danzig look like a mincing little pansy. In other words, it’s ballistic blast after blast of savage screams and guitars pushed into the bleed zone, and it transcends superficial ear-shredding with massive riffs and chops that move by at lightning speed. When it came out people were dumbfounded. Tim Y at otherwise poor tastemakers Maximum Rock and Roll wrote a review that was the words “This is fucking great! This is fucking great!” repeated over and over. It’s just that kind of record, barely connected to the art-metal they pursued just one album later.

I stand by that description and then some, with the exception of "barely connected to the art-metal they pursued just one album later”, as that’s almost certainly exaggerating to make a point. “Die Kreuzen”, the album, is unlike any other HC record ever. It scrapes the edges of light-blur metal and jagged, weirdo post-punk night sounds to come up with a wholly singular & incredible record. You know, it actually came about a little late in the hardcore lifecycle – 1984 to be exact – and I’ve never felt it’s received its due for being as shredding as it is.

Consider the vocals. Dan Kubinski’s raw, throaty near-falsetto was multitracked and amplified such that he sounds like a screaming, lunatic creature of some kind, totally in keeping with the LP’s bizarro futuristic cover art. You might call it “heavy metal singing”, but that’s wildly off the mark to my ears. Guitars straddle the border between sci-fi art sounds and straight-up ripping hardcore, and that’s something they carried through to the next album (“October File”) as well, albeit with a totally different production style. I reckon that for many a hardcore punk partisan, that strangeness might have been a bit too much to take. Most importantly, if you can handle how jarring this entire record is, you will find that is absolutely impossible to play it at anything but maximum volume. Thus it’s perfect for a window-rattling solo car ride or for an evening when everyone else is out of the house & you need to let out some of your pent-up shit. I call it a masterpiece, and one of my Top 20 favorite records ever.

PS – I suppose it would help to mention that you can find this album on Touch & Go’s CD of “October File”. It is illogically sequenced after their 2nd album, and starts in around Track #15.